What were you doing when you were 12 or probably 5? Meet Tanmay Bakshi, an Indian-origin pre-teen from Brampton, Canada who started coding when he was just 5 years old. He built his first app for iPhone called tTables when he was just 9 years old. After a few rejections, the app was finally published on Valentine’s Day. Today, three years on, at the IBM Developer Connect, he spoke about a new algorithm called ‘AskTanmay’ – a web-based NLQA system using IBM Watson Cognitive capabilities.

In fact, he remained the star of the event, right from the time he took to the podium displaying his oratory skills. He also demonstrated ‘Ask Tanmay’ on stage with a few questions including “Where is Taj Mahal?”. It’s an algorithm that loves solving queries and he has now made it open source. “I would like to share my knowledge with others,” said Bakshi. Ask Tanmay combines Watson analysis and Google results. The evaluation isn’t just keywords, but content pulled from Google matches into Watson Relationship Extraction (BETA).

Bakshi tells us that he is studying in 7th grade and is being home schooled, which gives him a lot of flexibility when it comes to utilising his time. “At 5 years old I didn’t understand the concept of a job. Computer I thought was just a toy. Coding was fun for me and something I did in break time. So, coding isn’t really work for me,” he added.

He learnt about Watson through Jeopardy! documentary and soon started studying Watson’s Retrieve and Rank and Language Classifier services. Soon he had video tutorials being posted on his YouTube channel Tanmay Teaches. And, he likes responding to emails from his subscribers too. Well, that’s not all, Bakshi is also an author and already has a book to his credit called Hello Swift. The book called ” Hello Swift” is about iOS programming technique for kids, and also beginners.